The crucial role of IT department in times of health crisis

The IT department has played a key role in the management of the crisis, and has been a real cornerstone of business performance.
Fabrice LAMBIN, IT Director for France, agreed to come back with us on the actions set up since the beginning of the health crisis to allow the continuity of the activity and generalise home-working for many employees, notably all the support functions.

March 2020, the 1st confinement is suddenly announced in France. Companies must react quickly to this unprecedented situation and, it is undeniable, the IT department has a major role in the continuity of the activity. Providing laptops, opening VPN access to as many employees as possible … these were the challenges for the entire IT department. But not only that: generalising remote working for all employees brings with it other measures and precautions … the infrastructure behind it had to be modified, access security had to be reviewed and the deployment of Office 365 had to be accelerated.

The equipment 

More than 600 VPN access were opened during the 1st containment to allow most of our employees to work at home.

Laptop computers had to be prepared and delivered urgently, within the limits of the stocks available from the manufacturers. The number of laptops has overtaken the number of fixed PCs in the last few months, and laptops are now favoured when new employees arrive.

VPN access created

of laptops to date

The security and applications

We had to modify the infrastructure and upgrade our antivirus system. Invisible to employees, the back-office work required on more than 3,000 workstations to maintain an optimal level of security was considerable.

In addition, the crisis greatly accelerated the deployment of the Pack Office 365, which was already being rolled out in France. Between April and December 2020, 1,880 deployments were carried out. All employees in France now have Office 365.

Finally, some of the Group’s applications are now accessible even without a VPN to enable more and more employees to access the tools and reduce bandwidth.

Office 365 deployments

workstations affected by the change of antivirus software

“During the first confinement, we had to react in the urgency of the situation. Serving the Group’s employees, we worked hard to ensure that everyone could continue their work from home. At the second containment, many actions had already been put in place, which made our task much easier. We can say that we learned from the first containment. Our efforts have been praised by the Group’s management. »